A Change Would Do You Good
by Mediancat
Summary: There's a superhero patrolling Neptune . . . crossover with DC comics.
1. Prologue

Okay, I had this idea and I had to write it . . . If anyone wants me to continue it, let me know . . . I will when I get done with "Death Becomes Him: if people are interested.

Disclaimer: The Veronica Mars characters and setting belong to Rob Thomas. The other characters referenced who will eventually show up belong to DC comics.

X X X X X

Prologue

Shifter flew over Neptune, looking for trouble.

And when you look for trouble in Neptune, you usually find it.

In this case, Shifter found it at the nearby Sac-n-Pac, where someone holding a gun was running out of the door holding a wad of cash and, for some reason, a bag of Cheetos.

"It's never just the money," Shifter thought. "No, they always have to take some food with them. It's like, the $150 isn't enough, I'd better take some junk food to prove what a man I really am."

She began to swoop down.

Unobtrusive, Shifter wasn't. Not when she flew, at any rate. The only form she could take that flew was that of some form of pterodactyl -- not being able to change her weight when she transformed was a bit of a drawback.

The robber saw her descent and began firing when Shifter was still about fifty feet up.

Over time, Shifter had managed to control her transformations to the point where bullets didn't cause her nearly as much damage as they did the average person. But she still liked to avoid getting hit by bullets whenever possible. Of course, she thought, so did everyone . . .

Turning once, she waited until she was about twenty feet off the ground when she changed her form to that of a cheetah.

The robber -- one of Weevil Navarro's rejects, it looked like -- fired once more, wildly, then got on the motorcycle.

Shifter was on him before he'd gotten ten feet. Growling and snarling, she did her best to throw the man off balance.

She fell off before he did, but the damage was done. The motorcycle plowed into a highway sign about fifty feet away and the man got off and started running for the nearby woods.

A cheetah wasn't built for woods, so Shifter changed, this time into a wolf. Then she ran after the man.

He could hear her coming. He pulled the pistol from his waistband and began firing frantically over his left shoulder.

The bullets missed, but when the biker turned around to look, the wolf was nowhere to be seen.

Shifter wasn't dumb enough to stay directly in the line of fire; even a bullet fired wildly could still hit something.

Instead, she circled around, changed shape again, and jumped on him from a nearby tree in the form of a leopard.

The robber tried to fight it off, but to no use. . "Alright!" he said. "Alright! I surrender, already."

"Damn straight," the leopard growled. Human vocal cords in a leopard body were impossible, but Shifter had learned to alter the animal vocal cord's enough to give her a rough form of speech. It gave her a sore throat when she changed back into human form, as she now did -- that of a woman in a dark costume that covered her entire body. The only thing that could be seen was her long dark hair. People thought she was no doubt drop-dead gorgeous under the costume --weren't all superheroines? -- but Shifter had never revealed her identity to anyone, as far as people knew.

The Neptune Sheriff's Department arrived a few minutes later; Don Lamb himself got out of the car and said, "Thanks, Shifter."

Inside her costume, the woman grinned. "No problem, sheriff. Money's in his back pocket and the Sac-n-Pac cameras should have it all on tape." She pointed to the bag still held in his right hand. "He didn't even drop the Cheetos."

"They never do," Lamb said. Lamb then handcuffed the biker and the woman changed into an antelope of some form and ran off.

The world had had superheroes since the late 1930s, all the way back when the first Flash and Hawkman debuted. It hadn't been until a couple of years ago that Neptune had gotten its very own superhero, the mysterious shapechanger known only as Shifter.

As Shifter approached her residence, she changed back into human form -- that of a 5'3" woman with long black hair whom no one in town would recognize.

Then she dodged into an alley and resumed her natural form, then came out and opened the door to her apartment.

The man inside said, "How'd things go tonight, sweetie?"

"Same ol' same ol'," said Veronica Mars.


	2. Secret Origins

Note: The "metagene," in the DC universe, is used to explain superhuman powers that don't otherwise have a specific origin, like being rocketed from Krypton, being a half-Atlantean/half human hybrid, or being hit with a bolt of lightning while being doused in chemicals. It's DC's rough equivalent of mutant, although there aren't the same negative associations with having a metagene in the DC Universe as there are being a mutant in Marvel.

This is a Veronica Mars/DC Universe crossover. The DC Universe in question will be sometime before Identity Crisis. I own neither Veronica Mars or the DC Universe

FLASHBACK: The Secret Origin of Shifter

Veronica waited in her father's police car while something was happening at the Kane estate. When she noticed Duncan just sitting there, she went up to him and asked what had happened.

When several tries brought a blank reply and no words, she ran back by the pool and saw Lilly, lying there, dead.

My god! Who did this? Who --

Veronica wished she could find out who so she could punish them --

And anguish plus the presence of a metagene activated the metagene.

Something . . . changed. She felt lower to the ground somehow.

Deputy Lamb said, "Who let this dog in here?"

"Dog, what dog?" Veronica asked. Or tried to.

All that came out was a bark.

How the hell had she become a dog?

And what was that smell?

She couldn't contain herself. She ran up to the body while people yelled "Get that dog out of here!" and sniffed it.

Somehow, she knew Lilly's smell. She knew it.

She also smelled Duncan all over Lilly . . . but there was another smell. One that trailed off around the house. It smelled of blood. Lilly's blood.

As the people around her yelled at her, Veronica raced off to find the smell. She ran around the house and found the trail ending somewhere in the driveway.

Dammit, here? No. It couldn't end here. If only her sense of smell was even better . . .

And then, somehow, she could smell the car that Lilly's killer had been in. She knew dogs chased cars but she'd never known they could smell them.

She ran off down the road. A couple of miles away, it pulled into a driveway.

Veronica recognized the place -- the Echolls estate. She jumped the fence easily.

It couldn't have been Logan . . .

It wasn't. The car was one owned by Aaron Echolls.

And now that she concentrated she could pick up Lilly's scent again. It ran inside the house.

Well, she couldn't break down the door. If she were human, she could knock, but . . .

Abruptly, she seemed taller again.

Veronica knocked on the door. If she saw Aaron Echolls, she'd --

She'd what? The man had a metagene himself, after all. It was what made him so in demand for action roles: he could do most of his own stunts. He had a modest amount of superhuman strength -- nothing on Superman's level, but he could pick up a car -- and while he wasn't indestructible Mike Tyson could hit him and he wouldn't feel it. Nothing she could do would do any damage. Not even as a dog.

So when Logan answered, she said, "Logan -- it's Lilly. She, she --" and she started crying.

Through the sobs, she told him. And when Aaron Echolls showed up to see what was going on, she amazed herself by being able to explain without directly accusing him.

Her Dad showed up to collect her an hour later. When he asked how Veronica had managed to run the two miles in ten minutes, she could only say "adrenaline."

He believed her. He had to. What else was he going to think? That his daughter had a superpower?

X X X X X

Over the next couple of months, while she tried to figure out how to use her powers, her life crumbled around her.

Dad, for good but wrong reasons, had thought Jake Kane had had something to do with Lilly's death. When she tried to say she didn't believe he'd done it, he asked why; and of course, Veronica couldn't tell him. "Well, Dad, when I shapechanged into the form of a dog, I smelled him, and . . . "

And the Kane family engineered a recall election and got Dad removed from his position of Sheriff, and Mom left, and Veronica, even knowing her father was wrong, stuck by him. He was her father, after all.

The one saving grace was that Logan Echolls, of all the 09'ers, didn't abandon her. He'd appreciated the effort she'd taken to tell him about it. Not many other people wanted much to do with her, but that was fine, because it gave her time to practice her powers.

Veronica discovered quickly that she could only shapechange into animals -- and her weight didn't change. So while she could become a mouse or an elephant, she would have been an exceptionally heavy mouse and an elephant that would could be knocked over by a determined ten-year old. So she read up on animals that weighed about 95 pounds. Wolves; cheetahs; leopards; certain antelope and deer; some seals. She wasn't stupid enough to try to shape change into a fish; the learning process might have killed her, like it nearly had when she'd learned how to fly.

She'd determined that she couldn't fly unless she changed into a pterodactyl. That was a bit of work. The first three times she tried she nearly killed herself when she flung herself off the tree; she came in like a crashing glider.

The third time, when she changed back from her pseudo-pterodactyl into her normal human shape, she heard a voice behind her going, "Oh my god."

And then Veronica turned around and met the one person who would know her secret identity.

"What did you just do?"

"Tried to fly," Veronica said. "Kind of failed."

"But you were -- I mean --"

"A pterodactyl?" Nodding. "Yeah. I've got the metagene and I'm trying to figure out how to use it."

"Wow, that's -- that is just so cool. I wish I had a metagene."

"Oh. Well, since you know my secret, you may as well know my name. Veronica Mars."

The young woman smiled. "Cindy MacKenzie. But everyone calls me Mac."


End file.
